德国艺术

Episode 1: Divided land

Cold, damp, mysterious

Italian historian gives the name of Germanic tribes

Compare to Italy vista, Here is Forest as the primeval environment.

Central image for art

German gothic cathedral

Branch, Million of twigs, like St. Peter, cologne

Ghouls, devils, demons

Middle age superstition

Black Death, Artists not to create beauty, but to comfort

Isenheim Altarpiece

Grunewald

Albert Durres

Solemn, sober (very German), Reproductive print, Full of emotion

Tilman Riemenschneider sculptor, using Limewood

Martin Luther: Protestantism, Reformation

Wittenberg

Bind German lands into a single nation. Reduce church rituals from 7 to 2, only keep baptism and Eucharist （圣餐）

Put faith and reason into German characteristics, Unite disparate German peoples under the banner of Faith

They, Italian, catholic

We, sober, Lutheran

German nationalism

30years war, Sweden and Spanish superpower are happy for Germany to be all small parts

Dresden, Augustus the strong, Zwinger Palace, and Green vault

Enlightenment, intellectual thoughts,

Storm and stress (Sturm und Drang)

Schiller, Goethe, Hayden

Frustrated uncertainty

Messerschmidt

Beneath public self, subconscious, all these desire and fear

Discontent and desire to change

Episode 2: Dream and Machine

Ludwig I: unite and expel the alien forces

Valhalla: hall of heroes, vision the great future German

Philosopher Herder: National glory is a great seducer

Napoleon fight in Russia, German men were sent and died. They want a strong leader

Romantic generation, turn to the land and the nature to look for strength

Technology and science

Runge

Look for answers, yearning for a new nation

Childhood is the sacred stage

Powerless, vulnerable, but full of energy, defiance

Napoleon Waterloo, happy that emptying the alien threat, be expelled

Prussia

the wanderer above sea of mist

Caspar David Friedrich

most famous German painting in the Romantic period

to capture the mysterious spirit of the German lands.

nature worship

poetic, not see in one minute, after 20 minutes, maybe you can see something.

deeply symbolic relationship with the world

it’s up to every man to find his god, in nature.

man’s insignificance in front of the vast cosmos

Baltic

he shows to the world, how beautiful this part of German can be

The Monk By the Sea: reveal his self-doubt, because his own lift experience (mother and brother died).

太喜欢他对这幅画的描述了，结合了他的身世背景、也结合了当时德国的历史背景。用诗意的语言、动情的神色讲述如何感受这样一幅画。如果不是知道他说的这些，站在这样的画面前，我肯定是无力欣赏的，通常这样的风景画在博物馆里我都是匆匆掠过的。（忽然回忆起在墨尔本的生活经历，最可贵的就是美术馆都是免费的，我经常一个人就是在那里静静地看画，看每一个细节。）

the nature is so elemental, almost be an abstraction. even similar to a painting by an American abstract expressionist like Mark Rothko.

whole world distilled into three elements,

• the blank land;
• the stretch of black, brackish sea, the Baltic
• great expanse of bruise-colored sky, empty

intensified the emptiness

to show the enlightened, romantic, Protestant devotee of Nature

the monk is finding his own personal sense of divinity, confirmation in the majesty of the natural world

a depiction of doubt

a war memorial monument

show Prussia’s determination to forge a Greater Germany

建筑师Schinkel，

No more Christian cross, but the Iron Cross

Not Gothic spiral, but Prussia bayonet(刺刀) towards the sky

weak, divided, easy target for foreign invader

谁能想象这曾是德国人的历史境况？也正是由于这样的情况，才有了普鲁士的铁骑以及之后的德意志（这三个字翻译的真是很传神，）

Friedrich Wilhelm start the frenzy of architecture, to show strength, sophistication and ambition.

Column and imperial eagle, are the symbols of Berlin’s ambition to become a new Rome.

Adolph Menzel, painted the transformation of Prussian German.

• Monarchy, when Wilhelm I became the first Kaiser of the united Germany.
• Lust of consumption
• steely military
• construction of rail track: darkest painting, like a modern inferno, a modern Germany forged in hell

Richard Wagner, “the Ring”, he wrote: this world is evil, evil, fundamental evil, it belongs to Albereich, no one else.

新天鹅堡，reclusive隐居的King Ludwig II

only with his servants and commune with art and nature

imagine still the medieval age, in his own fantacy. but the truth is he has no power, need to sign treaty with Prussia. The old Germany is really a past now.

Rapic industrialization

technology, science

The distinction between apprentice, journeyman and master is deeply built into the old German tradition of organizing work.

led the chemical science, produced more steel

Rapic industrialization takes the toll of people who create it, the workers

Kollwitz, depict the miserable life of workers. use the events from the past to explore the suffering she saw in the present.

social deprivation

but this is viewed as a sin against modern Germany.

State-approved art, statue of chancellor Otto von Bismarck

to question the modern Germany artists need to stay in the fringe of the city.

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, feel lost, personal anxiety, Berlin at night

Otto Dix, horror of modern warfare

mustard gas, invention of Prussian in chemistry; modern technology did terrible things and bear to human bodies

Franz Marc, heightened form and color, idealism, reentering the Eden, horse and deer. he drew when he was fighting in 1st world war, but he was killed on horseback in the war. End of German Romantics

Episode 3: In the shadow of Hitler

Post war, Weimar Republic

broken society

Otto Dix,modern art, collage,”Skat Players”

GeorgeGrosz “Grey Day”

In Munich, Hitler was sent to jail and wrote “Mein Kampf”, blueprint for a new Germany, a devastating work of cultural criticism. He argued Modern art is a moral plague, sent by Russian communists, using Jewish art dealers

Bauhaus, idealism, utopian, Walter Gropius, Bauhaus manifesto,

Cubism bauhaus stairs painting, Nazi closed the school.

August Sander, photographer, question: wer sind die Deutschen?

concentration camp of modern art,

self pick what arts are good, can be in the Deutsch Ausstellung in Munich Kunst Haus. what are not good, have another exhibition to let people laugh at

propaganda, march-like opera, with lighting; radio; architecture

war will be forgotten, but buildings will stand. “word in stone”

Germania, capital of new Europe

architectural model of his hometown Linz, Austria

drag art into black hole, poison the idea

iron curtain, cold war

Baselitz “the big night in the bucket”

After the war, no one wants to remember anything. Artists want to dig up for you and make people remember.

Bernd and Hilla Becher, photographer, winding tower, industrial facilities, eg. blast furnace- this makes icon, and icon makes steel, steel makes bomb

Joseh Beuys, ask “how to recover from the trauma”

the story about get saved by Tatars with felt and fat,

sculptural way to say “all you need is love”

checkpoint alpha, preserved, you can walk around to feel the regime of terror

campaign against forgetting, you must meditate on this, because this must never happen again.

anything can be art, everyone is artist; many graffiti

freedom

but another side: responsiblity，Beuys, social sculpture, 7000 oak trees with a pillar of basalt tree, in the city of Kassel. the city becomes a piece of art, citizens take responsbility